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The Media Effect
Recent Titles in Democracy and the News Editorial and Opinion: The Dwindling Marketplace of Ideas in Today’s News Steven M. Hallock No Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11 Lisa Finnegan
The Media Effect How the News Influences Politics and Government Jim Willis
Democracy and the News Jeffrey Scheuer, Series Editor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Willis, William James, 1946The media effect : how the news influences politics and government / Jim Willis. p. cm. — (Democracy and the news, 1932–6947) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN–13: 978–0–275–99496–9 (alk. paper) ISBN–10: 0–275–99496–1 (alk. paper) 1. Government and the press—United States. 2. Press and politics—United States. I. Title. PN4738.W55 2007 302.230973—dc22 2007010318 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2007 by Jim Willis All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007010318 ISBN–13: 978–0–275–99496–9 ISBN–10: 0–275–99496–1 ISSN: 1932–6947 First published in 2007 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Joe Hight of The Oklahoman A fine friend, a fine editor
Contents
Series Foreword by Jeffrey Scheuer
ix
Preface
xi
(1) Media Impact on Government: Views Vary
1
(2) The Media and Political Action
15
(3) The Media and National Development
29
(4) How Events and Issues Become News
43
(5) What the Research Reveals
55
(6) Decoding the News: A Primer in Media Literacy
73
(7) Politicians and Journalists: A Symbiotic Relationship
93
(8) Presidents and the Press
105
(9) Conducting War in a Media Age
117
(10) The Media as the Fourth Estate
137
Notes
147
Selected Bibliography
155
Index
157
Series Foreword
It doesn’t require much study of the mass media to realize just how complex the subject is, or why it fascinates. The media, collectively speaking, are both literal and figurative prisms. As imperfect lenses through which we perceive nearly all of politics and social life, they are not stable, isolated elements within society; but neither do they stand wholly outside of it. Instead, they are part of a vast and evolving ecosystem of tools and techniques, actions and events, ideas and perceptions. As necessary instruments for accessing life on a larger scale than personal experience, the media forever straddle the boundary between what we perceive and how we perceive it. One result of this is a binocular effect, a kind of necessary double-vision, as we seek at once to understand how things really are and, at the same time, how the media’s reproductions – what Jim Willis, following Walter Lippmann, calls the ’’shadow world’’ – shape and are shaped by the ‘‘outer world’’ they aim to reproduce. We try to see the world clearly as if from the outside, but we also swim in it; and as Marshall McLuhan said, whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish. This disparity between the mediated and unmediated realms, noted by Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922), remains problematic. As Willis concisely explains in his Preface: ‘‘The pictures we have in our heads about the way our world operates fuel our behavioral reactions which take place not in a world of ima